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I have eaten many types of ice cream in the past – this is despite family history of diabetes. Not that I could not care less, but sometimes in life we need to have some indulgence. In fact – I have been cutting down my sugar tremendously because of family history. I don’t take sugar with my coffee nor I take any sodas or desserts unless its a cheat meal. My sugar intake is down to the milk in my coffee.

Back to the topic of the blog, Cremia. If anybody were to go to Japan. I will always recommend them to have Cremia. Creamia is a soft serve that is sold by this company called Nissin. The soft serve is result of many years of research (I assume) to find what is the best balance of creaminess and taste. It is something that I will eat over and over and over again.

In my last trip to Japan – which was a month long trip, I did pace myself because I didn’t want to get myself overloaded with sugar. I probably had about 5-6 of the ice cream. And I must say – I did enjoy each and every piece of the ice cream. The creaminess and texture – combined with the eloquent taste, just reminds you of what are the best things in life that you can indulge on.

I would fully recommend anybody to go and have this ice cream. Its just amazing.

In fact, Business Insider almost made a feature on Creamia. It has landed in LA. What I heard is that the ice cream also is now available in Bangkok! Time to spend some time in Bangkok!

Oh yeah – one thing that I need to say is that even the cone is different. It is one of those butter wafer type that is heavenly. Goes extremely well with the ice cream!

I am definitely a coffee addict. Looking at the amount coffee that I consume – I do spend a lot of money on coffee. When I was in Japan – I did go to Starbucks almost every single morning because they do have very good brewed coffee – or Coffee Of The Day. Same goes when I got back to Malaysia – I continue to have brewed coffee whenever I have time to get a cup of Joe early in the morning. As I am an early bird – most definitely it is almost like a daily affair. One thing about brewed coffee, it gotta be fresh off the brew otherwise it will taste like shit.

Now back to blue bottle. I have never heard of them before, but on the last day, while chilling by the roadside waiting for the time when I need to go to take my train to Narita, I saw this coffee shop near Shinjuku. So many people were queueing up for it. So I could not help it but to google for the brand – Blue Bottle. I couldn’t help it but to see this article.

So – I quickly pack up and rush. Thank god – the queue was not so bad then (so I think). What I did not know what that the queue was just for the order, and then you had to wait while they make your coffee. It was a good 15 mins before I had my coffee. Anyway – the coffee was really good I must say. One of the best that I’ve tasted in Japan. I will definitely come here again. I also got a chocolate saffron cookie. Oh emmm geee. It was so good.

We always dream, always try to achieve the best in you, always imagine what it could be if you can do this and that. But the fact of the matter, we still stay in reality. And the dreams would not be achieved if you don’t work for it.

I have friends who said that they are a dreamer, but question in my mind is that – if you are a dreamer, are you working hard enough to push yourself to achieve your dream. Well – this is also a self reflection that I keep reminding myself. It is easy to dream, it is easy to think about the best car in the world, but reality is reality. We need to work for what we want, and nobody is going to give you anything.

So what I am doing today that will make a difference for me to achieve my dream?

The first question should, what did I dream today that I want to achieve?

I am missing Japan to be honest – it has been almost 4 weeks since I am back from Japan. Here is one of the best photo I shot with my phone. It was shot using my iPhone X 🙂

The view is from Tokyo Tower. Its not that far from the city centre, but all things considered – it was a long journey. There are a lot of things you can do in Tokyo Tower but I guess for me given that I am on tight budget, I just do what I think I need, which is to see Tokyo from the Top.

I could not resist but do this ideating shot of “touching” the tip of the tower. Its wasn’t easy given that I was trying to adjust the camera and my hand. Clearly my hand-eye coordination is extremely bad. Very bad indeed.

The photo above is one that really making feel like pissing in my pants. I have a severe fear of height. To be honest even with the “safe” environment – I am really scared of that.

Anyway – if you do go to Japan, Tokyo specifically – do visit Tokyo Tower. On a good day, you can see Mount Fuji 🙂

According to LoanStreet – The Rule of 78 is one of the most prevalent secrets in the banking industry that is barely understood by the public. This post is about me trying to understand how it works, and hoping to share with you so that you understand and be able to figure out how you can apply it to your financial decision.

Since I got to banking I am in a learning mode. Learning how the banking system work. Being a self-professed technical person, I will try to understand things in a more technical way. Whether for good or bad.

The situation now is that I am buying a new car and deciding how many years should I take up the loan. And since I am not yet eligible for staff loan yet, I need to resort to a conventional loan from other local banks that offer Hire Purchase. So in order to calculate this – I need to understand how the settlement works. Well – fact of the matter the settlement is done by returning back to you the interest that was charge. Do understand that for typical hire purchase here is the formula:

So what this mean is that the interest are charge up front when you take the loan,

Question is now, when you terminate your loan, how do you calculate the interest that will be returned? Well – generally its calculated by “Rule of 78”. What this rule essentially says, the borrower will be paying greater part of the interest during the initial part of the loan. I.e, more interest are apportion during the first year versus in the later years. Note that this is different from the “Daily Rest” or “Monthly Rest” types loan in which the interest are always calculated based on the outstanding balance prorated to the period.

Example “Daily Rest”, the interest rate is divided by 365 days and then applied daily based on the outstanding amount that the borrower has. This should be better because as one pay earlier, the outstanding amount will be less and therefore the knocking off the principal amount is faster. Note that when you pay, interest will be the first to be paid before the principal. Principal is the original loan amount. So if one is smart, you will be able to “game the system” and able to pay less interest if you know when to pay your loan.

Back to Rule of 78. So the question is how do you calculate the weightage? Lets take an example above, 5 years loan. A lender would make a sum of all the months:

So basically what happened is this, the way the interest is calculated is in reverse. I.e. interest for the first month is based on the assumptions above:

Which make it quite interesting because if the weightage of the interest is fair, then the total interest that will be refunded will be a lot less if you were to settle earlier.

So what I did in order to calculate how long is my loan duration is for me to plot a table of the settlement price versus the depreciation of the car and eye ball for a sweet point in which I am willing to sell off the car. I will explain that in another post. But I hope you do get what I mean by Rule of 78.

You may think that this may not seem fair for the borrower, but you need to understand that for a bank, each of the loan has a lot of cost thats associated to it. From creating the infrastructure to manage the balances to hiring sales people to push the loans. And thus they need to be able to make money out of the lending that they do to their customers.

I hope the post is somewhat beneficial. Remember please do read the terms and conditions of your hire purchase or loans and see if Rule of 78 applies. They may not say specifically that they use Rule of 78, but you can see that the calculation is similar.

Note; I am not a financial advisor therefore I am not responsible for any inaccuracy of the information posted here. Please do your own research and consult professionals if you need any advice regarding your financials. I wrote this post to poke my readers curious minds 🙂